Whether rabble-rousing at Baptist summer camp or guarding seal pups by the Salish Sea, Peterson has a gift for describing...
An environmentalist writer’s lifelong struggle with her evangelical roots.
Given her career of writing passionately about nature and her ecological activism, one might think that Peterson (Animal Heart, 2004, etc.) was reared in a family of liberal environmentalists. In fact, her household was just the opposite: fundamentalist, Southern Baptist, and evangelical to the core. She began to doubt her place in God’s Christian army from a young age, when her pensive questions about animals’ souls and the afterlife got her kicked out of Sunday School and regularly rebuked at the family dinner table. She could never come to terms with the way that Christian fundamentalists, who considered themselves “in this world but not of it,” could fixate on a future in heaven while disregarding the beauty and fragility here on earth. This dangerous backwardness was most appalling in her father, who eventually headed of the U.S. Forestry Service. It wasn’t until well after college, newly recovered from a harrowing stint as an editorial staffer at the New Yorker, that Peterson learned to hold her own with her boisterous, highly conservative relatives. After years spent on the West Coast among liberals supposedly more like herself, Peterson began to recognize parallels between the rigid fundamentalism of End Times evangelists and the doomsday environmentalist camp. Both dwelled on the negative and used fear of annihilation as their main conversion tactic, and neither could satisfy her longing for a spiritual home in the natural world. By keeping the thread of her theme running consistently throughout the book, the author offers a selective memoir that blends her unique autobiography with compassionate and levelheaded observations about family, food, religion, life and our relationships with living things.
Whether rabble-rousing at Baptist summer camp or guarding seal pups by the Salish Sea, Peterson has a gift for describing her life’s many adventures with disarming understatement and narrative poise.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-306-81804-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Merloyd Lawrence/Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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